Another year along in the eventual takeover of mankind by technology.. and yet we're still dealing with spam.

It’s amazing, don’t you think? We’ve been hard at this technological revolution for a good thirty years now (or fifty, or a hundred, depending on where you set your starting point in the grand history of book learnin’), and just about every year, everything changes.

Apple puts out an iPod, another year along the iPod is all but dead, replaced by an iPhone, which is then tanked by a tablet.

One year, computer memory costs a fortune and limits the ability of some to keep up with the latest software, then a few years later it’s so cheap that nobody even knows how much memory their computers have – in fact, their cameras and phones have more memory than their desktops did just a few years earlier.

3D comes back to movie theatres, and by the end of the year it’s in TVs. Everyone dumps VHS for DVDs, and Blu-Ray makes DVDs all but obsolete, with Netflix and video on demand providing the deathblow.

Once, computer savvy folk boasted about their graphics cards, or their screen resolution, or their baud speed, and now none of that is a part of the conversation, with everything having multiplied so much in speed, storage, efficiency and low price that they’re part of throwaway components.

And yet, one computer evil has prevailed, despite everything we’ve thrown at it: Spam is still an affliction.

Unsolicited email has been the bane of my existence since I used to run BBS systems in the pre-web years. With every attempt to stomp it out (government threats, law changes, Microsoft once proposed they charge a small fee to send an email, which upon reflection seems not a bad idea), it’s just shifted into more and more complex forms.

We’ve gone through Nigerian princes wanting to send us money, people telling us our penises are too small, people selling us fake drugs, people telling us our bank account has been locked and we should ‘click here’ to fix it, with the ‘click here’ link being something like scotiabank.russianmafia.ru..

But at the end of it all, the worst part of spam isn’t the giant mechanical automatic Caribbean-based financial rip-off merchant… those are pretty easy to spot by now. No, much worse than that, especially if you’re a journalist, is the individual who thinks that you’ll be really interested in what they have to say, and who won’t take no for an answer.

I had a run-in earlier this year with the Wheelchair Basketball Association, of all people, who insisted on sending me their press releases even though I didn’t ask for them, and don’t write about anything close to wheelchair basketball. I followed their directions to unsubscribe, but they re-subscribed me. I unsubbed again, and was soon being spammed by a new email address. So I blocked that email address, and another rose in its place. It took me, literally, three months to get off their lists. By the end, it was no longer about keeping a clean inbox, it was a personal mission for me to beat them somehow.

Journalists get a lot of crazies looking for their attention, and a lot of them came out in advance of the Mayan apocalypse. Interestingly, those have dried up recently, which either means they’re a little shocked they were wrong, or means they were taken by Mayan Gods and we just haven’t realized it.

I’ve had people insisting that they’re the victims of US mind-control experiments, I used to take regular calls on a Saturday night at the Sun newsroom from a woman who insisted that she predicted whatever story had broken that week, but ‘never got around’ to letting us know about them ahead of time. And then there’s the people who are outraged – OUTRAGED – that we’re not covering a story that we covered on the front page several times through the week. Often you’ll later find out that they were looking at another newspaper – or TV new show – and figured that we’re all part of the same company.

The worst are the hateful spammers – the ones who seem to think that we all share their bigoted worldview. They use phrases I won’t repeat here like they’re peeled out of a thesaurus and not out of Mein Kampf, and they’re amazed that you’d rather not hear from them again. So amazed that they give it another crack and try to convert you before you hit the ‘block sender’ button.

The most insidious, for mine, are the policy spammers. They’re the ones that will do up a nice professional looking press release on a topic you may or may not have an interest in, and before they hit send, they put together bogus credentials in the hope you won’t look too deeply at their legitimacy. I call these the most insidious because, sadly, this trick often works.

The Australian media has been hit with several of these over recent years – someone pretends to be an expert in debunking global warming and puts out a spurious press release that most ignore, but once one outlet runs with it, it becomes an ‘according to media reports’ story where one can legitimately run a story they know will get clicks, even though they know it’s wrong, because another media outlet has leant it legitimacy.

Biostitutes, as I like to call them, work actively toward this situation. It’s what they need to get legitimacy, that one hapless editor who is pressed for time or cuts a corner to get home early or doesn’t dig deep enough. If one says, “Really, I didn’t know that” and reprints rubbish, it’s out there forever.

Mischa Popoff has been pumping these out for some time. He’s an ‘organics expert’ who paints himself as a policy advisor to the US Heartland Institute. He writes books – well, self-publishes e-books, which he claims in his bio are ‘critically acclaimed’ – and gives speeches to anyone who has a hole in their calendar and a specific political tilt – that is, they think organic food is eville (like the fru-its of the dev-il) and that we should look to big agriculture for efficiencies and best practices.

For a year now, Popoff has been sending me spam. When it first hit, I told him I wouldn’t be promoting his book because a cursory search for Mischa Popoff shows his credentials are bogus. He responded by ensuring any time he wrote an email, it arrived in my inbox with a CC.

I ignored him for most of 2012, but in early December replied to one with a simple word: “Unsubscribe. He refused, instead sending me long emails of further claims.

My reply, at the time: “Mischa, taking a course for advanced inspecting and calling yourself an IOIA Advanced Organic Inspector is like me taking pilates class at a UFC gym and then putting “UFC trainee” on my business card […] You’re passing yourself off as someone who was employed by [the IOIA] as an advanced inspector, not as someone who took a course. That’s why they’ve asked you to stop using their name [..] You’re passing yourself off as something you’re not… If I do write anything about your book, it’ll be to point that out.”

He replied, “Does this mean I shouldn’t wait for your call?” to which I suggested he shouldn’t wait any more than I should await a call from the UFC. And then there was peace… for a while.

But about six months ago he decided to start spamming again.

He spammed and spammed and spammed. Most recently, he proposed debating me in a ‘face-off column’.

My reply: “Try to follow along – you’re a spammer. I haven’t read a thing you’ve sent because I’ve specifically told you not to send anything to me. This appears to be an instruction you’re incapable of following[ …] Spread your misinformation elsewhere.”

I should probably point out here that the Heartland Institute has taken money from Exxon. A lot of money. The American Petroleum Institute also chipped in, as did Philip Morris when they were called Philip Morris – you know, back before governments across the US sued them into the stone age over tobacco deaths and they changed their name to avoid the blowback. Then there’s the Illinois Coal Association, nuclear energy companies.. most recently, leaked documents have shown they’re engaging in a campaign to change school curriculum to undermine the importance of science and the idea that fossil fuels are bad for the environment. These are the people Popoff runs with while he tries to tell people that organic food is BS.

December 23: “Well… I told you so. You have simply GOT to take a look at this Chris!”

Unsubscribe.

December 25: “Sorry old boy. I mistook you for a journalist.”

Unsubscribe.

December 27: “Hi again Chris: A follow-up to my email below… Rich Keller, the Editor of Ag Professional (Vance Publishing) just ran an article quoting me. As he puts it..[blah blah]”

Unsubscribe.

December 30: “Why are you so insistent on not hearing what it is I have to say? Quite baffling really, given everything you write about.”

Unsubscribe.

December 31: “How exactly do you stay informed if you only listen to those who affirm what you already believe? Have you ever heard of a news tip or a press release?”

Now, some of you may point out, rightly, that there are tools that can block the sender’s of such rubbish in most email programs, and that’s true. I’ve blocked this guy before – his response? Send email from another account.

It’s 2013 (in a few hours). Why do we not yet have a machine that can do what they always do in the movies – send a virus into his computer that makes sparks and fire come out of it? The movies were doing this stuff back in 1985 – CURSE YOU, SCIENCE! WHERE ARE MY ROCKET PACKS AND EXPLODING COMPUTER PROGRAMS!?!

Guys like Popoff, who claim to be experts even though their schooling consists of a B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan where he specialized in the history of nitrogen for fertilizer and warfare, feed off the credibility that a legitimate news source can bring, and if he sends enough spam to enough under-staffed newsrooms, someone, somewhere will give him that brief moment of “Really? You don’t say?” that he desperately hopes for.

Sadly, there are thousands of Mischa Popoff’s out there, including some pretty high profile ‘public intellectuals’ who, because they’ve got that newsroom cred, are now their own industries. See Coulter, Ann. Or, for that matter, Kardashian, Kim. His strategy for self-promotion is to science what American Idol is to music – a shortcut that hurts everyone around him.

Popoff will soon be out of my inbox, and right now I’m enjoying the possibility that someone in the future, considering him as a source, might find this post and think twice before doing so.

But the fact that there’ll be another just like him tomorrow makes me sad. I pine for a day when I can check my email and find only missives from people I know, trust, find value in knowing, and want to hear from. And jet packs. I *REALLY* want jet packs.

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